Eclectic Christian

Christ on the throne

By Michael Bell

This is Part 6, of a multi-part series looking at the deity of Christ. Here are the links to the Introduction and Table of Contents.

In our previous post we introduce Jesus Christ as the Word of God. John 1:1 makes a very powerful statement about the Word of God, he says, “The Word was God.”

Now this I think is probably my most difficult post to write in this series. I entitled my series “Reflections…” because they are my thoughts on the subject. In giving my thoughts on the subject, I wanted to prompt your thoughts on the subject as well. Sometimes though, when you get a statement as powerful as “The Word was God”, it is difficult not to dive to deeply into the intricacies that exist, especially when there has been considerable debate around the meaning of the term. I will try however to make it an enjoyable rather than mind numbing read.

The phrase “The Word was God”, when read in the Greek language, has a few interesting parts to it, especially considering its brevity.

• There are dual subjects, otherwise known as nominatives in the phrase, “The Word” and “God”.
• There is an equating verb, “was”.
• The word order in Greek is reversed from that in our English Bibles, so that the term for God appears before the term for “The Word”. It should be noted however that word order in Greek is of secondary importance, so that while it might aid our understanding of the meaning of this text, we should be careful not to base a theology upon word order.
• Only “Word” is accompanied by the definite article “The”, “God” is not accompanies by the definite article. Greek has no indefinite article “A”. Lack of a definite article, will often result in the understanding of an implied English “A”.  This however is not the case here because…
• Greek grammatical studies have shown that when two subjects are joined by an equating verb and the one subject has a definite article associated with it, then the second subject either has an implied definite article (Colwell’s rule) or is to be understood qualitatively (Harner’s analysis).

Now if your eyes haven’t glazed over and you would like to read more about about the Greek intricacies related to John 1:1, and why some of the other understandings of this verse are lacking in validity then here is one of the many web resources available on the topic. If your eyes have glazed over, then let me gently bring you back with a plain English explanation.

The best ways to understand John 1:1 is that either John is directly equating Jesus with God, or John is saying that Jesus has all the attributes and qualities of God.  As Daniel Wallace states:

He shared the essence of the Father, though they differed in person.  The construction the evangelist chose to express this idea was the most concise way he could have stated that the Word was God and yet was distinct from the Father. - Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, p. 269

All the attributes and qualities of God. This fits so well with what we have learned from the previous scripture passages that we considered, where we read that Christ was “in very nature God”, the “image of the invisible God”, and “the exact representation of [God's] being”.

Notice the interesting parallel we have with John 1:14. “The Word became flesh”. We see the movement here of the Word, having the attributes and qualities of God, taking on the attributes and qualities of a human being. It is a movement echoed in Philippians 2, from being “in very nature God”, to “taking the very nature of a servant.”

By looking again at the quotation by Daniel Wallace we can see how the Word can be both with God and yet be God at the same time. For the the Word, while having the essence of God, is also understood to be distinct from the Father. This again fits very nicely with the diagram of the Trinity that we introduced in an earlier post which showed that while Jesus is God, Jesus is not the father.

“The Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  It is amazing how much meaning can be packed into such a short phrase.  What a wonderful concept.

Christ on the throne

By Michael Bell

This is Part 5, of a multi-part series looking at the deity of Christ. Here are the links to the Introduction and Table of Contents.

In Parts 3 and 4 we looked at how Jesus was called both the Image of God and the Brightness of God’s Glory. We want to continue with the Hebrews 1:3 passage and look at the next phrase:

Hebrews 1:3 (NIV) – The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.

We will get into the phrase “sustaining all things” in a future post. We want to first look at the word “word”, and see how else this is used in scripture. Our minds are immediately drawn to probably the most famous passage dealing with the deity of Christ, John Chapter One”

John 1:1, 14, 15, 29, 30 (NIV) In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… The Word became flesh and lived for a while among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the on and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. John testifies concerning him. He cries out, saying, “This was he of who I said, ‘He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’”… The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Look the Lamb of God, who takes saway the sin of the world! This is the one I meant when I said, ‘A man who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’”

I used a longer section of the passage here than is normally quoted, just so that it is perfectly clear that the one who is identified as the Word of God in verse 1, is positively identified as Jesus through the connections in verses 14, 15, 29, and 30.

This same Jesus then, in verse 1 is said to be both with God, and to be God himself.

Three questions naturally spring from these statements:

1. What do we understand by this phrase “The Word”?
2. What exactly do we mean when we say that the Word was God?
3. How can you be with God, and be God at the same time?

We will look at the first of these three questions in this post, and will tackle the others in the next posting.

Many years ago, I was given a booklet by some Jehovah’s Witnesses coming to my door. It was called “The Trinity.” In it was a section on what the Church Fathers believed. Among other Church Fathers, they quoted Tertullian, one of the most prolific writers of the early church. According to the booklet, Tertullian had written:

For before all things God was alone—being in Himself and for Himself universe, and space, and all things. Moreover, He was alone, because there was nothing external to Him but Himself.

What my visitors did not know is that I had recently read Tertullian’s works, and knew that they were only giving a partial picture. I asked them to come back on another day, and in the mean time, started to read through Tertullian and the other Fathers to find out where their quotations had come from. (They had supplied no source references.)

I found what they had written in Tertullian’s text “Against Praxeus”, Chapter Five (written circa 208 A.D. when Tertullian was about 63).

For before all things God was alone—being in Himself and for Himself universe, and space, and all things. Moreover, He was alone, because there was nothing external to Him but Himself. Yet even not then was He alone; for He had with Him that which He possessed in Himself, that is to say, His own Reason. For God is rational, and Reason was first in Him; and so all things were from Himself. This Reason is His own Thought (or Consciousness) which the Greeks call λόγος, by which term we also designate Word or Discourse and therefore it is now usual with our people, owing to the mere simple interpretation of the term, to say that the Word was in the beginning with God;

I love this comment from Tertullian. In one fell swoop he does a number of things:

1. Helps us counters the J.W. claim that the Deity of Christ was a concept introduced by Constantine during the Christian Council at Niceae in the forth century.
2. Helps us show that the leadership of the Jehovah’s Witnesses were intentionally misleading their followers, by only giving a short section of a text which has a completely different meaning when a larger text is taken in concept. (When my visitors came back I had them read directly the various passages from the church fathers. I made it clear that they had been intentionally deceived. By the looks on their faces, I knew that they knew it too.)
3. Perhaps most importantly he shows that the concept of “The Word”, goes far beyond, God’s spoken commands, but extends right into the very thought of God.

As God’s logos, Christ’s intertwining with God, extends down to his very thoughts. But Christ is more than God’s thoughts, he is God’s thoughts expressed and acted upon. In this sense he is “The Word” of God, acting as God’s spoken agent in the world. Future posts will discuss what this means for both our creation and salvation.

In our next post however we will discuss how “The Word” is both with God and is God.

As usual your thoughts and comments are welcome.

Christ on the throne

By Michael Bell

This is Part 4, of a multi-part series looking at the deity of Christ. Here are the links to the Introduction and Table of Contents.

In our last post we we looked at how Christ was the image of God, using the analogy of light from a star. We also touched on how he was the brightness or radiance of God’s glory.

Hebrews 1:3a (NIV) – The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being…

Hebrews 1:3a (KJV) Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person…

Brightness and Glory. Glory and Brightness. They really go hand in hand. It seems like you can’t have one without the other. You certainly can’t have brightness without having a source of that light. Can you have glory without brightness? From our human perspective you would think that if you were to take brightness away from glory, what you would be left with would be no longer glorious. But it is always difficult to use human terms to describe an infinite God, and in this case, God doesn’t seem to work that way.

As Philippians 2:7 says, Christ voluntarily “made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant”. Yet nowhere in scripture does it imply that the glory of the Father is somehow reduced or compromised by Jesus taking human form. Jesus makes it clear in John 17:5 that the Father is still the source of glory and that as God the Son, he expected to share in that glory again.

John 17:5 (NIV) – And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.

As the brightness of God’s glory, Jesus certainly shared in God’s glory in a way that no one else could. It was a glory that Christ had with God even before the world began, and shared again after his death and resurrection. Consider this next verse:

Isaiah 42:8 (NIV) – I am the LORD; that is my name!
I will not give my glory to another or my praise to idols.

God is not willing to share his glory with another! Yet, as we have seen, he shared it with Christ, the brilliance of his glory, before the world began! This is only possible if Christ is God.

As usual, your thoughts and comments are welcome.

Christ on the throne

By Michael Bell

This is Part 3, of a multi-part series looking at the deity of Christ. Here are the links to the Introduction and Table of Contents.

Have you ever considered what happens when you look at a star? We don’t actually see the star itself, but the light that in generated by that star. Not only that, but the light from the closest visible star (other than the Sun) takes over four years to reach our eyes. So, you are not actually seeing the star as it exists today, but as it existed when that light wave was sent from the star at least four years ago. And of course our eyes can only process the visible part of the entire light spectrum, infrared and ultraviolet rays are invisible to us.

Similar things can be said of God. John writes that “No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.” – John 1:18″ Jesus himself said, “And the Father who sent me has himself testified concerning me. You have never heard his voice nor seen his form.” – John 5:37. He also stated “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” – John 14:9.

How is it that seeing Jesus is like seeing God? Colossians 1:15 says that Jesus “is the image of the invisible God”. One of my favorite passages, Hebrews 1, states:

Hebrews 1:3a (NIV) – The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being…

While the meaning doesn’t change, I like the wording of the King James Version.

Hebrews 1:3a (KJV) Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person…

Getting back to the star imagery, the light from a distant star forms an image on the retina, and helps us learn more about the star. Similarly, Christ as the brightness or radiance of God’s glory gives us an image or exact representation of an invisible God. The best way that we can understand what God is like is by looking at the Person of the Son. He is that part of God that we can see and experience directly.

I believe also that an “exact representation” goes beyond mere image but to the very essence of who God is. Philippians 2:6 stated that Jesus was “in very nature God”. He has within him the all the qualities and attributes that make God who he is. (More on this in our next post.)

Think back to our triangle diagram and imagine that the only part of the diagram that you can see is the part that says “Son”. While we no longer are able to experience Christ face to face, we have much to learn from those who were his contemporaries and wrote about their experiences with him. As a result, we are able to know much more about what the rest of the picture is like, through our learning about the Son.

Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.

The image of the invisible God.

The radiance of God’s glory.

The exact representation of [God's] being.

God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.

In very nature God.

Very powerful words, leaving us no doubt as to the nature and character of Jesus Christ.

As always your thoughts and comments are welcome.

 
 
 
 
(Note to readers here: The star is used as an analogy here. Any analogy when taken to far will eventually break down. Here I am comparing a visible star to an invisible God so right away we see that the analogy can only be taken so far.)

Christ on the throne

By Michael Bell

[Updated with Comments from Joshua Hearne]

This is Part 2, of a multi-part series looking at the deity of Christ. Here are the links to the Introduction and Table of Contents.

We want to continue by discussing what we do not mean when we say that Jesus Christ is God.

We do not mean that Jesus is the Father. The New Testament is very clear to distinguish between God as he is revealed as Father, and God as he is revealed as Son.

Although it is very difficult to use a two dimensional diagram to describe what God is like, this diagram may help.  Although we say that the Father is God, and the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, it is clear that we do distinguish between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.

Writers in the early church compared God to a river.  Each stage of a river is different, from where it may start as a spring bubbling out of the ground, through the meandering in may experience through the countryside, to  the delta it forms as it empties itself into the ocean.  We would not try to say that the start of the river is indentical to the end of the river, and yet we would say that each part of it is the river.

If a guide takes me to the head of the Amazon river, he would say “that’s the Amazon river.”  When he takes me to the middle of the Amazon river,  he would say, “that’s the Amazon river.”  When he takes me to where the Amazon river empties into the ocean, he would say, “that’s the Amazon river.”  Each part of the river is called the river, and yet each part of the river makes up the river as a whole.

That being said, every analogy of the Trinity will break down if stretched too far. This is simply as a result of not being able to describe the infinite with finite language.

As Joshua Hearne, a co-author of Eclectic Christian notes in the comments:

The problem with the river image is that a particular section of the river is not simultaneously source and delta. We must be careful not to slip into modalism and assert that each of the three coequal persons of the trinity are one God serving/manifesting in three different roles. This is a similar theological problem to what we end up with when we look at “forms of water” or “the egg.”

I agree that you can’t limit the Trinity to the roles that are played within the Trinity. Each of the three persons of the Trinity have different roles to play, but their interdependence is so much greater than the roles they play. The river analogy breaks down when you consider that a river can have many sources. Take away one source, and you still have a river. A river may, or may not have a delta. Not having a delta does not detract from the fact that it is a river.

The same can not be said for the Trinity. I believe that there is an interdependence in the Trinity that is not properly captured in the river analogy. I wanted to conclude my series looking at the interdependence of the persons of the Trinity, but I will try and change around my original posting plan so that I look at it first and use it a framework on which many of the other posts will hang.

It is very difficult (if not outright wrong) to put God into a box. It is impossible to describe the infinite in finite terms. So understand that I am not trying to delineate the edges of the box, rather it is my attempt to say, “Here is what we do know about the deity of Christ. Please understand that our knowledge is imperfect, and our understanding of the topic is imperfect, but we present it as best we can so as to improve your knowledge and understanding.”

So, keep these illustrations and analogies in mind.  When we come to some of the more difficult explanations, they may be of help.

Do these illustrations help you?  I am very much interested in your feedback, and your comments are always welcome.